Oakland Community College’s Auburn Hills campus is accustomed to emergencies. In fact, emergencies are staged there every day at the school’s Combined Regional Emergency Services Training (CREST) center, a training “city” that simulates emergency situations faced by law enforcement, fire and EMS departments and civilian first responders.

CREST’s integrated educational experiences and real-life scenario training are the result of emergency responders collaborating with Oakland Community College, which has more than 40 years of experience in educating emergency services personnel. The program trains upwards of 90% of the emergency responders in Oakland County and graduated over 1300 students in the last five years.

The program has students in critical training classes moving from the OCC classroom to the CREST site where they learn how to respond to real-life emergency situations in this “live lab” setting.

Basic and advanced emergency services personnel, along with private industry and civilian organizations, learn by putting theory into practice in a secure, controlled environment that includes furnished homes, a bank, convenience store, motel and five-story fire training structure, which is a national model for emergency services training. The site’s own police vehicles, fire engines and ambulances are also part of the training.

In addition to CREST, OCC offers a wide variety of Homeland Security programs in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Urban Area Security Initiative, the Partnership for Environmental Technology Education and Oakland County’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. These partnerships expose students to domestic and international terrorism and disaster response issues and help prepare local Community Emergency Response Teams.